Solar Lighting

The solar panels have been successfully installed! Thank you Dordt College students for fundraising this and especially to Renee Ewald for spearheading the idea! For those of you who are interested in the technical side of things, we have installed a 5 kW, grid-tied solar panel system. This means that when the sun is shining high and bright, the whole compound (church, school, and orphanage) can run on solar, and when we have cloudy days, the solar supplements the utility power, bringing down the cost. If you go to the website attached below, you can see the latest data for energy production.

Over the month that the system has been running, we have already produced close to $250 worth of electricity (electricity from the utility company costs about $0.49/kWh in Liberia, quite a bit more than the $0.09/kWh we pay here in Sioux Center!). This information uploads a few times a week if you want to stay up to date with it! Also if you want to know more about this project, have any technical questions (we know you science-minded people can get excited and curious 😉), or want to do any future solar projects in Liberia, send Austin an email at austin@onebodyonehope.org, he would love to talk more about it!